We're hiking a desert trail complex in southern California, a mere twenty minutes into the hills, just three quarters of a mile out—less than that maybe—when Cameron Diaz declares she wants to stop and rest. She even says she needs to. This is nonsense. She's being nice, mostly as a gesture to my labored breathing, and we both know it. She gives me no choice. She is knowing and hard to resist. And me, I have questions. So if she sits, I do, too. No choice.

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Out here, everything is slow. The traffic on the distant 405. The planes lifting off as if with the machinery of a hot air balloon. Even before she arrived, I sat on a rock at the park entrance watching a rattlesnake nudge itself in the narcotic heat, moving at the pace of the human bowel. Six inches in one hour. Slow, I'm telling you.

As for Cameron Diaz, she is just plain fast. She loped up here, grabbed the mountain with her toes, and pulled it down. Long-legged, every part of her narrow. Put together and unworried. She springs when she walks, registers none of the stresses of age. Her clothes cling tightly: yoga pants, little linen top. Her hat remains jauntily askew, her face slightly masked by the big sunglasses of the moment.

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And yeah, I'm a little winded, but I keep reassuring her: There's no need to worry. "I walked across Scotland last summer," I say, which is true. "You don't have to stop hiking on my account." Which makes her nod. Here she is, forty-one (and turning forty-two this month), ethereal, gripped by fitness and lightness of heart, lugging a water bottle from which she never drinks. She does an Audrey Hepburn glance over her glasses, seeing what she can see and settling on a picnic table on a random plateau with an excellent view of the valley. Nary a bead of sweat dots her delicate, fairly huge forehead, and when she laughs at my protests, it's a lilting pleasure, a borderline bark, and the usual questions of laughter—with me? at me?—don't matter. It's fun either way, like she's your pal, which she is, in a world in which you are surrounded by shitheels, which it is. I get it. She's smart enough to know how much trouble she can bear.

"This is good," she says. "Let's just talk here." She's politely pretending this is where she intended to go the whole time, a short hike up a steep hill from which, if I look hard enough, I can still see the rear fender panel of my rental car.

Why here?

"This is where I run," she says. She points to one ridgeline, then another, then one more.

"So it's clear why you'd be gassed after twenty minutes," I say.

"Oh yeah, I'm a little off today." She's giving me a Cameron Diaz look, that chin-back, head-tilted, I'm-fucking-with-you thing coupled with a well-executed what-me-worry glance and a high-scoring c'mon-we're-in-this-together nudge that has, over twenty years, sold $3 billion in movie tickets.

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For a hot minute, we stare silently into the suburban magic west of Burbank. A hot-ass California morning, too. Hawks overhead. A helicopter prowling in the faraway, the calls of unfamiliar birds, and the chronic smell of the ever-expanding desert. A guy pulls up on a bike to fuss with the inflation of a tire. "Boy," he says upon recognizing her. "The stars are out. I just passed Steve Martin up there."

"Is that right?" she says. "What does it look like we're doing?"

The guy shrugs. "Sitting?" he says.

"Hiking," she says. Then she smiles at me, gives him another look—a shove-off-I'm-with-him smirk, which always feels like a gift from a beautiful woman. "What are you doing?" And he answers, because she's Cameron Diaz.

Everything is so dry, so ready to burn. California knows. The world knows. Cameron Diaz sure as hell does. "Get this," she says, starting in on her drive to meet me this morning. "It's a red-flag day, right? Highest danger. And I'm driving up here and there's this guy in the car next to me, smoking a cigarette. So I tell him, 'What the hell? It's a red-flag day. You can't smoke in the valley on a red-flag day. It could all go.' " Talk about fast.

"You know what he did?" she says. "He flicked his ash at me." Then another Diaz look: a can-you-believe-this-shit jaw drop accompanied by openmouthed amazement at the stupidity of the thing. And really, flicking burning ash into a drought-ridden tinderbox? "Worst thing he could do," I say.

"That's the point!" she says, palm-slapping the picnic table, which may or may not be another trademark gesture of hers. And the question is: Would you listen to the warnings of Cameron Diaz as she is trying to protect you? Would you do what she told you to even if it was shouted from a car window at an intersection in Topanga Canyon?

Vincent Peters

"Man, I love the heat. The heat is...well."

"With so many words," I say.

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She shrugs and nods. "Words," she says, "were what brought me to it. So I can't say I wasn't aware."

In her new movie, Sex Tape, she plays a bored married lady who must recover a sex tape accidentally leaked to friends and neighbors, and, improbably after all this time, it's her first time getting naked for the camera. "Yup. It's a first for me. But Jason [Segel, her costar] gets naked, too. It's just a part of the role. So I did it. I mean you see everything."

She pauses to consider this. "It's a weird job, right? I found myself in a room in the middle of nowhere Massachusetts at 11:00 at night doing a childbirth scene, and everybody's screaming at one another—Jason, the cameramen, the director. And me acting like I'm trying to push a basketball out of my vajoon. Crazy shit, right? And the thing is, I always take a moment to say, 'We're lucky. This is a great job. A fun job.' "

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"Vajoon?" I say. "How do you spell that?"

"I don't know," she says. "Sounds French. Va-jeune. But I also think I made it up."

Earlier this year, she published a self-help book called The Body Book, so it's easy to concede. I looked into the book, underlined some words: hydrate, stretch, find a routine, walk more, be quiet. Women have been telling me shit like this for decades now. And they've mostly been right. But on that day, on a dusty pass above the valley, I kind of want to challenge Cameron Diaz.

"So you're in shape," I say. "Okay: Can you do a cartwheel right here in the desert?

"Of course I can."

"Will you?"

"Um, no. Not without a warm-up. Not without warning."

"I can do a cartwheel."

"I'd like to see that."

"Not unless you do one first."

"I'm not doing it. Because I could fuck it up. I'm not saying I will, but I could. I'll tell them you did one, if you want."

This made me laugh. "I'll just tell them the truth. Life's not a competition, after all."

"Oh, if you want to compete," she says, "I'll do it. I'll kick your ass."

Our conversation trips along: architecture. Design. Music. I ask her what she likes, but she begs off: "No, I want to know what you like."

I tell her what I was listening to on my headphones before she arrived, when I was sitting on a rock watching the rattlesnake nudge along. And what I tell her is the truth, which I think is pretty cool, and to which she replies: "What do you like that's a little more, I don't know, contemporary?"

Which just pisses me off. And I look at her and say musical taste is too narrow for me now. The party line these days. She puts her palms up and says, "C'mon."

The fact that I couldn't think of anything or anyone, not even one note at that moment, probably made me say, "I like the Ex-Coroner's Window Shade." Which is not a real band. And I thought I might tell her, but then I didn't, because I like that Cameron Diaz moment in which she knows that you know that she's messing with you, and there we were, tables possibly turned.

"It's a first for me. But Jason [Segel] gets naked, too. So I did it. You see everything."

"I don't know them," she admits. "Where are they from? What kind of music is it?"

Muskegon. Club music.

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And then I say: "I like Mountain Greens. And the Dolphin Hunters." And I add where they're from. Charley and the Ticktock Boys. Fern Russell. Forget Krakow. And so on. I name seven bands, one breath each. Fake ones all.

But here's the thing: At the end of all of it, Cameron Diaz doesn't claim to have heard of any of them. She never tries to nudge in with insider's knowledge. She answers everything so clearly and earnestly that it seems like any kind of music at all might exist as a possibility in her mind. She never hesitates to say, "I don't know." And this makes me like her. She seems to be listening, trying to remember what I say ("They wrote an entire opera about Tampa?!") so that maybe she could look it up later. Saying "Oh yeah, I've heard of them" is the easiest lie there is, a fib, really, since every band name starts to sound like every other band name eventually. She just won't bite. Which makes me think that maybe she's the one messing with me. Or maybe she's just that honest.

Toward the end of the morning, we stand above a bushy ravine. She says we might go down there, but then has second thoughts. It's steeper than she remembered. There are snakes all over the place. And there's the climb back up. Another smart decision, made in a reasonable fashion. Everything is lit by the sun. She is quiet, thinking what else she'd like to try.

And I ask flat out: "You really have it wired just now, don't you? I mean you are on top of things, aren't you?"

She laughs—big, long, hard, very Cameron Diaz, and says, "Yeah, I guess I do. I like being forty-one. I love it. So much shit just falls away. Fear, mostly. It's the best age. That's when a woman knows how to work things, or she doesn't care about that anymore. You just stop being afraid. You don't worry about what men think. You just don't worry that time registers anything awful."

"But you're rich. You …" I would say I stammered here, caught between saying "You are beautiful" and "You don't have children," thinking, I guess, that those facts probably had something to do with life being easy. And since I hate stating the obvious—even though it must be said: She is beautiful—I went with "You don't have any children." And I thought there'd be a reverent silence then, since most Americans seem to consider having children to be the holiest of holy creeds, the sacred mission of all women, the thing that many assume compels us all to happiness. But Diaz jumps on that.

"That's true," she says. "It's so much more work to have children. To have lives besides your own that you are responsible for—I didn't take that on. That did make things easier for me. A baby—that's all day, every day for eighteen years."

"You mean forever," I reply.

"Longer, right. Yes. Not having a baby might really make things easier, but that doesn't make it an easy decision. I like protecting people, but I was never drawn to being a mother. I have it much easier than any of them. That's just what it is. Doesn't mean life isn't sometimes hard. I'm just what I am. I work on what I am. Right now, I think, things are good for me. I've done a lot. And I don't care anymore."

I look down the ravine, at the litter of steep washes, the ruddy brush. "You want to go down there?"

She raises an eyebrow. "Not really," she says. "There are snakes."

"Really?" I say, tiptoeing for a look. "You don't want to be a topless head-chopping snake hunter?"

She shakes her head. "Sometimes there are junkies shooting up at the bottom, too. So," she winces, "needles and snakes." I look down. "Jesus, that would be some fall."

We laugh. "There are places like this," she says. "They are everywhere. We all know that. And I have to protect myself. I can only protect myself. I've always been the only one in charge of that."

I listen. Look again. So steep. I might never get back up. And I really don't want to go on without her.

A Note on Those Pipes...

Holy shit, Cameron Diaz can whistle! And it's not just any whistle—it's the two-fingers-in-the-corners-of-your-mouth, loud-as-fking-hell whistle you always wished you could do. The whistle that'll make a New York cab stop on a dime. The whistle that'll call your kids or your border collie from a mile away, so they know the food is ready. The whistle that that big guy behind you at the ball game belts out right in your ear. It's annoying as hell but… goddamn, I wish I could do it. So it was startling and completely mind-blowing to watch this gorgeous leggy movie star in her sexy black bathing suit (see: cover of this magazine) run across the rooftop of the photo studio, towering in her six-inch heels, and phweeewphweet to her friend two rooftops over. It was better than her infectious laugh, better than her dancing and shaking her ass to Beyoncé and Daft Punk, better than the dirty jokes she'd tell to lighten the mood. The whistle is truly the gift that separates her from all the rest.